A pair of "protesters" outside the Game Developers Conference helped draw …

Between all the scheduled panels, meetings, and game demonstrations, covering a gathering like the Game Developers Conference can sometimes feel a bit too predictable. Thank God, then, for scenes like the one above, in which two "protesters" threw a bit of unpredictability into the proceedings by noisily decrying a focus on marketing and monetization that they say is holding the game industry back.

Johannes Grenzfurther, the guy holding the "God Hates Game Designers" sign seen above, is no stranger to "autonomous actions" like the impromptu protest he held in front of San Francisco's Moscone Center this week. As the founder of international art group monochrom, he's helped organize "context hacking" happenings that have involved everything from building cocktail robots to sending scanned scrotum pictures to various politicians (no, it's not safe for work).

Fellow protestor Adam Flynn said he's worked on noncommercial games in the past and follows the industry closely. He wanted to take advantage of the conference "opportunistically" to promote the idea that gamers should be seen as the audience for artistic works, rather than as monetizable customers to exploit.

"When you start to treat someone like a bundle of revenue rather than as a humane and natural and vital end unto themselves, it leads to a sort of cheapening of human relations," Flynn told Ars Technica. While commerce has always been a part of video games, Flynn says the free-to-play model is especially harmful to the idea of games as meaningful experiences.

"At least when there was an initial transaction, the relationship afterwards was to provide fun," he said. "Now, the notion of games as a service leads to an ongoing sales pitch. Anyone who's ever dealt with a door-to-door salesman has realized that relating with that person in a deep or human manner is relatively hard to come by, and there is a certain feeling of the relations with the other person being reduced to a mechanistic sense."

Flynn was unsympathetic to the suggestion that providing games as an ongoing service means that developers need to make sure the player continues to have fun well after the initial purchase.

"If you reduce fun to a set of mechanisms reminiscent of a rat in a cage hitting a lever to get a pellet, I think that reduces something rich and vital about the human experience," he said. Now is the time to discuss these issues, he added, as the first few decades of a medium's development can affect the way it progresses well into the future.

Bemused GDC attendees stop to take pictures of the protestors, who insulted the attendees' chosen profession continuously throughout.

Kyle Orland

Grenzfurther insisted that the pair's protest wasn't subtle viral marketing for some product or another—an important point to clarify on a street corner where paid spokespeople were handing out samples for everything from Magicka to Nos energy drink. Not that loud cries calling the conference a "temple of sin" and demanding that attendees kneel on the ground seeking repentance could be easily mistaken for marketing message in the first place.

"Look at all those sad faces, coming from your sad game challenges," Grenzfurther cried to a bemused crowd that stopped to take pictures. "There is time to turn around. There is time to stop that way of living. ... You don't want to be John Romero! Take your badges and throw them on the ground!"

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

Why single out games, we're being marketed to 24/7, and though games occupy a growing percentage of the marketing, it's still WAY below stuff like fast food, consumer goods and cellphone services for instance.

Also games cost a lot of money to do well, just like many other commercial art forms. (Movies come to mind - music can be done well on the cheap, movies are harder).If you can't get people to pay in some way, then you can't create games beyond the level of indie games. Those can be very cool and innovative, but there's a huge demand for games that deliver large worlds, beautiful visuals and complex interactions with the world, and that is expensive.

Maybe I'm not clear on exactly what they are against, other than they dislike free-to-play and presumably episodic content?

Well, don't the warmists pretty much do the same to average drivers? As in:

"Warmists" call car industry a "planet killer," demand CO2 controls

Sure, they may not call my 8-cylinder SUV a "temple of sin," as they use sightly different language, but the belief system and the attempt of shaming those who disagree with them is not entirely different from that of the wackos the article cites.

Actually I mostly agree with their reasoning. There is a huge incentive to just make experiences that are merely compulsive ala Angry Birds. Even games where "You don't need to actually buy anything to play the full game!" like Temple Run are just riddled with what feels like sales pitches and these purchases do in fact change things like your ability to score. What is the point of a score attack type of game where the scoring rules aren't rigid and you have no baseline for meaningfull score comparisons against other players?

It's meaningless and yet people continue to tell me there is value in that model. I thought we moved past these compulsive models and into more meaningful games with end of the "quarter eater" model that ruined a lot of the old arcade games?

Well, don't the warmists pretty much do the same to average drivers? As in:

"Warmists" call car industry a "planet killer," demand CO2 controls

Sure, they may not call my 8-cylinder SUV a "temple of sin," as they use sightly different language, but the belief system and the attempt of shaming those who disagree with them is not entirely different from that of the wackos the article cites.

Not only are you reaching but you're so far off topic lol.

EDIT: please don't take my reply as an invitation to expand on your idea here either. I just wanted to point out that it's off topic.

I have always felt hesitant about calling video games "services" unless there is a clear service that is being provided (such as MMOs or games where the company has servers for multiplayer). The more video games are called services, the more creator's will begin revoking access to paid customers based on those customers doing something the creator disliked.

omegahelix wrote:

Ugh. Everybody has an agenda, wrapped in religion, wrapped in rhetoric, wrapped in nonsense...

And hopefully wrapped in a bagel sprinkled with poppyseed and served with mustard. Then it is delicious.

Could that not be said of corporations in general these days? At least there are indie developers making inroads in some markets, but I have to wonder what happens as those platforms become more complex and mature? After all, PC gaming didn't start out being dominated by large corporations...

Why single out games, we're being marketed to 24/7, and though games occupy a growing percentage of the marketing, it's still WAY below stuff like fast food, consumer goods and cellphone services for instance.

Also games cost a lot of money to do well, just like many other commercial art forms. (Movies come to mind - music can be done well on the cheap, movies are harder).If you can't get people to pay in some way, then you can't create games beyond the level of indie games. Those can be very cool and innovative, but there's a huge demand for games that deliver large worlds, beautiful visuals and complex interactions with the world, and that is expensive.

Maybe I'm not clear on exactly what they are against, other than they dislike free-to-play and presumably episodic content?

L.

i think theyre against treating consumers solely as dollar signs. some devs/pubs create games as works of art that happen to pay the bills; some create (and exploit) games simply as cash grabs. i wont pretend to know where the line between the two is all the time, but the line is certainly there, and is certainly crossed. i believe the "protesters" are trying to send the message that focusing too much on the money-making and not enough on the art-making ultimately undermines both.

It's very easy to tell when someone is being sarcastic, then even easier to tell when others just don't get the damned hint.

"Why is there no report button?""i agree, though, that the joke was in poor taste. (assuming it was a joke. which im really hoping it was.)""Ugh. Everybody has an agenda, wrapped in religion, wrapped in rhetoric, wrapped in nonsense."

Yes. There are actually people who believe* that stuff. That's what I was talking about.

Whatever "believe" means. It's become just a means of pushing one's agenda.

Rather than a yes/no answer and an opportunity to elaborate, I think the implication of Pryopizm's previous question was more along the lines of why are you bringing this up when it has no relevance to the article?

If you'd rather be laughed at and dismissed rather than taken seriously, coach your argument around "God hates this thing that I hate!"

You (and numerous others, it seems) seem to have missed the point that this is a humorous stunt, and a parody of genuine (God hates x) protests. They're not being serious, although they are making a legitimate point.

"Flynn says the free-to-play model is especially harmful to the idea of games as meaningful experiences."

Hordes of Team Fortress 2 players disagree. F2P can be done well, and it can be done poorly. But it is not inherently bad.

The problem is that there are so many F2P games that are done poorly that it ends up being a tainted, dirty word. Any kind of simulation game where an action takes 4 hours real time but can be sped up with the purchase of some currency is the epitome of why F2P receives a terrible reputation. Yes, looking at FarmVille, Tiny Tower, Dragon Vale, The Sims Free, etc, etc.